The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 105. Dr. Aseem Malhotra: The REAL Reason for the Chronic Disease Pandemic

Starting point is 00:00:00 Poor diets is responsible for more disease and death than physical inactivity, smoking and alcohol combined. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer. So the biggest killer in the world has been confronted with one of the biggest medications in the world. And it hasn't slowed down. In fact, it's gotten worse. The main pathophysiological process behind heart disease is insulin resistance.

Starting point is 00:00:20 And there's no pill that's effectively targeting insulin resistance. During my career, we used large data. We were finding lots of trends that were not being echoed in mainstream medicine. Medicine itself is not an exact science. It's not like physics or chemistry. It's constantly evolving. And in fact, 50% of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. You're kidding me. This is how extraordinary and crazy this health misinformation mess is. When I was working on calls in the hospital, I was like, the food that was available wasn't the most nutritious. There's definitely something going wrong with the food environment here.

Starting point is 00:00:55 We've got this obesity epidemic, but we're selling junk food in the hospital grounds. That doesn't make any sense. More than 50 percent of Americans right now are pre-diabetic. What would you say are the suggestion steps that they follow to get out of it? So we go back to square one, and this may surprise a lot of people. You are in for a real treat. This guest, Dr. Asim Malhotra, is a board-certified cardiologist, a world-renowned cardiologist. He's an author. He's a huge advocate of dietary and lifestyle changes, but he's also published clinical research and written numerous papers in the British Medical Journal and all kinds of other

Starting point is 00:01:41 published journals. And this podcast was one of my favorite podcasts because we just got real, visceral, and raw about the corruption in our medical system, very often in our randomized clinical trials, and about what lifestyle choices you could make to completely change your trajectory to cardiovascular risk. In other words, if you have cardiovascular risk factors in your family, high blood pressure runs in your family, high cholesterol runs in your family, and you're worried and you don't want to go on statin therapy or you don't want to go on conventional therapy, this is the podcast for you.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Please pay attention. Get a pen and paper out. I loved it so much that when we were done the podcast, I did a short podcast with him afterwards because the post-podcast talk was so good. So enjoy this podcast, guys, and remember, it's just science. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today I have a very special guest on the podcast. I know I say that all the time, but this is an incredibly special guest, Dr. Asim Malhotra.

Starting point is 00:02:48 And Dr. Asim is a world-renowned cardiologist and author, a huge advocate of lifestyle medicine. And I am really, really excited to run this podcast. In fact, my team gave me the talent research on you. I said, no need. I've got this. I've watched his Rogan you. I said, no need. I've got this. I've watched his Rogan podcast. I've watched his documentary. I can't wait for you guys to listen to this podcast.

Starting point is 00:03:13 I can't wait for it myself. We did an entire podcast in the kitchen before we even came into the podcast room. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Malholcho. Gary, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you too. You know, interestingly, I got a call a few months ago from a good friend of mine in the UK, Dr. We call him Dr. E, Dr. Moen Yat. And he and I have been friends for years. And he was like, Gary, have you heard of Dr. Malhotra? And I said, you know, that name sounds familiar. He's

Starting point is 00:03:46 like, you've got to check this guy out. You've got to have him on your podcast. He speaks your language. I mean, he's right up your alley. And so I went down the rabbit hole of everything Dr. Haseem. And I got to say, man, I am extraordinarily impressed with your background, the fight that you've been on for humanity, your willingness to actually stand up and be criticized in the public square for going against the mainstream. And I really would recommend every single person listening to this podcast, I'm going to put a link to it in the notes below. Watch Do No that's b-h-a-r-m the documentary that he put together it's all in layman's terms it is absolutely eye-opening um i watched it once listened to it a second time while i was driving fascinating documentary it

Starting point is 00:04:38 will actually lay the foundation for you um for what is causing the chronic disease pandemic um in in this country And I thought it was fascinating. Your Rogan podcast was also excellent. I listened to that whole podcast. So I'm really excited to get going with you today. You know, I often start my podcast because with a similar theme, and I think that you fit this theme because I feel like a lot of the most impactful people in the world, the most passionate, the most purpose-driven people in the world that are following the calling are doing so because they solved a real problem in their life. They had a real issue. There was some tipping point, loss of a loved one.

Starting point is 00:05:22 They overcame addiction. They solved a health crisis that they were having on their own. And now they're out serving humanity the way that you are. What was it, if any, what was the tipping point in your life, that aha moment as a practicing cardiologist, as a traditionally trained allopathic physician that made you open your eyes and say wait a minute yeah um it's a great question gary i think there's probably been a number of events that have happened in my life that have shaped me and my journey not just one um a few key ones that come to mind certainly was uh when i was 11 years old my older brother um who was 13 he got viral myocarditis he just had a tummy bug either in six days he went into crashing heart failure and died so that was initially and

Starting point is 00:06:12 that obviously was quite a big event for our family you know my parents were both doctors almost helpless to do anything for him and uh that was my initial interest certainly in wanting to think about pursuing a career in cardiology. And then, you know, as things evolved over time, I had goosebumps, man. Wow. That's, that's incredible. Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, my brother had Down syndrome as well. And I think, you know, everything for me comes back to basic human values and about compassion for other people. And because both my parents were doctors, that was kind of almost a culture within our household that my primary duty in life was to

Starting point is 00:06:53 help others or do something for the community. And of course, looking through the health lens, that's ultimately why I decided to pursue a career in medicine. But I was most fascinated with cardiology probably because of my brother's death. And as that evolved for me as a doctor, having qualified in 2001 from Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland, and then sub-specializing in cardiology and then interventional cardiology, I was noticing more and more patients coming in with chronic disease. We're giving them more pills, more pressure on the system. Noticing my colleagues in the National Health Service feeling more stressed out. And I'm somebody that can think ahead and analyze things quite quickly.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And once I realized I saw a pattern, I thought if this continues down the same trajectory, we're going to get into a situation where our healthcare systems are going to collapse. And we might even be in a situation where we won't even be able to provide timely care for acute legal patients. And that the worst scenario of that, and we'll come back to, you know, my initial journey and my epiphany moments, ultimately culminated in my father, who suffered an unexpected cardiac arrest in the summer of 2021.

Starting point is 00:08:06 And he was a doctor. He was a doctor. And despite the fact it was witnessed with two doctors doing CPR on him and calling 999 in the UK, I know it's 911, and expecting while I was on the phone, the ambulance to turn up in eight minutes for him to be defibrillated because he was in the best potential situation to survive. And the ambulance took 30 minutes and he died. And that was a reflection ultimately.

Starting point is 00:08:28 And I investigated it and I wrote about it and it became a big news story. But effectively the healthcare system was under so much pressure that the ambulance crews were not meeting targets for treating heart attacks. So I never expected that to happen. But to come back,

Starting point is 00:08:44 certainly I think one of my, uh, one of the key moments for me when I got involved in the public sphere as a activist in terms of improving public health and tackling obesity was I remember in the summer of 2010, and 10, um, a patient came in in the middle of the night. I was working as a cardiology registrar. So I was essentially the, you know, one below the top tier in the hierarchy of being cardiologists trained in intervention, heart stents, for example. And I was on call patient comes in, in his fifties, acute heart attack. We treat him with emergency scenting. He, um, you know, I go back to bed.

Starting point is 00:09:25 I was on call, right? Next morning I'm doing the ward round and I'm giving him advice on the pills we're going to put him on, you know, blood thinners, a statin, um, telling him about, telling about following a healthy lifestyle. Right. And while I'm talking to him about healthy lifestyle, the hospital serves him a burger and fries. And he looks at me and he says, doctor, how do you expect me to change my lifestyle? If you're serving me the same crap on my language, that likely brought me in here in the first place. And for me, I just thought, you know, this is just crazy. You know, we, I was looking around in the hospital. I mean, I also, I think a lot of it, you know, you talk about personal stories, Gary, I am definitely somebody who I would describe myself as a foodie, right? I learned to cook when I was 16. My dad

Starting point is 00:10:10 taught me to cook. You know, I was famous in Edinburgh Medical School for cooking the best Indian chicken curry. I love Indian food. I like the butter chicken. That's my favorite. So I had an interest in food myself anyway. And I was thinking when I was working on calls in the hospital, I was like, the food that was available wasn't the most nutritious. And yet, you know, half of the staff, I mean, half of the NHS employees now, and I'm sure the figures are probably similar in the United States, are overweight or obese, right? So I was thinking there's definitely something going wrong

Starting point is 00:10:40 with the food environment here. So the next day after this patient story, after I, you know, experiences had this conversation with the patient, I thought, you know, somebody that had inspired me at that point, who I thought was, was really, you know, doing his best to help tackle child obesity was Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef. Yes. And I had a contact, a friend of mine who worked for the times at the time newspaper. And I asked her, do you have the email address for Jamie or his PA? And said, sure. Why do you want it?

Starting point is 00:11:08 I said, well, I think he's done great work on highlighting the problems with school food, right? Children's food. He should get involved in a campaign to improve hospital food. So I wrote this email one afternoon in my lunch break. Didn't expect a reply. And then six weeks later, I get a reply from his PA saying, dear Rasim, thank you for contacting us. You know, I said to him, I said, you know, you've done so much great work and hostile food is full of junk.

Starting point is 00:11:36 And he said, Jamie would be thrilled to meet you. Please come in and meet him on this date and we can have a talk and bring some of the doctors together. So when that happened, I have someone, Gary, that's always enjoyed writing. Um, you know, I, uh, my dad was a prolific writer. I think maybe I'd got those genes from him, you know, um, about NHS stuff and medical politics. Wow. And, uh, I started writing when I was at my school, which was very prestigious school in the UK. Um, I started writing articles when I was 16 for the school newspaper, we won national awards for that. So I had this kind of, I think, interest in writing and I'd written some articles for the guardian before about junior

Starting point is 00:12:14 doctors and, um, and medical training. So I'm going to meet Jamie and I get introduced to their health editor of the guardian newspaper over a dinner. And he said, this sounds like a really good story, but he says, it sounds like a great campaign. The Guardian newspaper can get behind like improving hospital food, right. As, as a, as almost like one of the ways to highlight and tackle the obesity epidemic, you know, we've got this obesity epidemic, but we're selling junk food in the hospital grounds. That doesn't make any sense, right. We have to, we have to start in our own backyard in the, in the terms of the health profession so um i went to meet jamie and he said in the end what happened was a guardian didn't start a campaign but he says listen why don't you write an article i can have a look at it and

Starting point is 00:12:53 pitch it you know to the guardian of the observer newspaper so i wrote this article about my meeting with jamie jamie said asim listen um i'm very much behind what you're doing but he had so many things going on i think he was going to Australia for a different campaign. He said, listen, I can give you supportive quote, but I can't get involved in a campaign right now. So I wrote this article and suddenly it becomes, I think this was February, 2011. It becomes a front page commentary of the Observer newspaper,

Starting point is 00:13:21 which is a huge impact newspaper in the UK. And it was called, I Mend Hearts. Then I see our hospitals serve junk food to my patients. I mend hearts and then see the hospitals serve junk food to our patients. So that's where things really took off for me in terms of getting into the public sphere. Yeah. And that was really a moment where I got really, you know, went down the track of, of looking into really the root cause of the obesity epidemic. As you know very well, Gary, for a very long time, how we got the dietary guidelines wrong,

Starting point is 00:13:49 how there was an oversupply of excess sugar. And then I was involved with the BMJ in writing articles to really expose and bring it to the mainstream, where sugar was a major issue. I mean, the British Medical Journal, I mean, which is a very prestigious like journal, you know, New England Journal of Medicine, which is a very prestigious like journal, you know, New England Journal of Medicine, a very, very prestigious journal. I remember, you know, in the documentary, you begin to go against the grain, which is very interesting because, you know, my audience knows I come from a big data background and I'm not licensed to practice medicine like you are. I have all the respect in the world for people that are. But during my career in mortality, we used large data as a predictor of mortality.

Starting point is 00:14:33 And in these large data pools, we were finding, you know, lots of trends that were not at all what you would hear in the mainstream. They were not being echoed in mainstream medicine. So, you know, high LDL cholesterol is, you know, this major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. We need to, you know, the lower the better for LDL cholesterol. But then we had mortality data that was the polar opposite and not an insignificant amount of mortality data. Mortality data on, in some cases, hundreds of millions of lives. And so we actually knew that the opposite was true, that actually people that had lower levels of triglyceride and healthy HDL and still had elevated what you would consider

Starting point is 00:15:19 clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol were actually living longer. Yeah. levels of LDL cholesterol, we're actually living longer. And we were seeing less reporting of things like hormone disruption, D3 deficiency, you know, muscular pain, chronic fatigue, complaints of brain fog, things like that, that you would think were the opposite based on what was going on in the literature. And I certainly wasn't qualified to comment on that. I wasn't, you know, out there on the front lines like you were. But, you know, you noticed this trend too. I mean, you've published papers on it and written about it and even been crucified for it.

Starting point is 00:15:58 And I want to walk people um, obsession with randomized clinical trials that, that we seem to have built an entire medical system on. Because another fascinating point, um, that I've seen echoed in your work and Casey Means and Callie Means work, um, I think the world of that brother and sister combo, is that we're not actually seeing all of the data. Yeah. You know, the data is seen by a very, very, very small group of people. And that small group of people then goes and says, here's what's in the data. You know, I think the analogy used in your documentary was, I'm going to look through

Starting point is 00:16:43 the telescope and then I'm just going gonna tell you guys what I see. And then you go tell the world, but I'm not letting anybody else look in the telescope. And talk a little bit about that because for the people that are not in the know, even for physicians, even myself that spent 20 years in that space, I did not know that that data was not really

Starting point is 00:17:03 being made available. Yeah, no, it's a really, really good point you raised, Gary. So we go back to square one for the lay person, and this may surprise a lot of people. Medicine itself is not an exact science. It's not like physics or chemistry. It's a social science, a science of human beings is constantly evolving. And in fact, the father of the evidence-based medicine movement, Professor David Sackett, Canadian epidemiologist, actually said that, and this is actually true, this has been shown in data to be true, 50% of what you learn in medical school will turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. The trouble is nobody

Starting point is 00:17:43 can tell you which half, so you have to learn on you you have to learn to learn on your own so you start from that position then you can get an open mind to how data and information can be potentially corrupted so it's the cholesterol issue is i think the major issue in helping us understand why we are where we are with our pandemic of chronic disease and you're absolutely right the dogma and the mantra for medical school training and even helping us understand why we are where we are with our pandemic of chronic disease. And you're absolutely right. The dogma and the mantra for medical school training, and even now amongst doctors and cardiologists is LDL cholesterol, so- partly because one of the drugs that is widely prescribed in cardiology are statin drugs and statin drugs, lower cholesterol, but specifically lower LDL.

Starting point is 00:18:35 And there was thought to be, you know, the, the, the best that we have in medicine to prevent heart attacks, et cetera, strokes and all cause mortality. But when I broke that data down, the first thing that, you know, I understood, which was not something I was trained to do in medical school is the absolute benefits from the so-called randomized trials done by drug companies of the statin drug in individuals is very, very small. So for example, if you have not had a heart attack or not had a diagnosis of a severe blockage in your coronary arteries, the benefit of a statin over a five-year period, on non-transparent data, by the way, we'll come back to that. So this is likely best case scenario, right? It's one in a hundred. So that means there's a one in a hundred chance if you take that statin religiously and you don't get side effects, it'll prevent you having a non-fatal heart attack or stroke without prolonging your life. Most patients are not told that, but actually that's the most

Starting point is 00:19:28 ethical way of engaging in informed consent, right? For lots of reasons. It's not going to prolong your life. There's a one in a hundred chance that this is going to do anything good for you. And most people in the world taking a statin drug, Gary, which is estimated to be between prescribed between 200 million and 1 billion people worldwide, are not going to get any benefit. And they're not even told that. This is how extraordinary and crazy this health misinformation mess is. The whole reason for informed consent is to not explain the randomized clinical trial to the patient, but to give them informed consent

Starting point is 00:20:05 like data like that. So they can actually make an informed decision. Absolutely. Hey guys, I'm really excited to announce this. Perfect Aminos has gotten a serious upgrade. They've added nucleotides, the building blocks of our nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. And this is important. We know essential amino acids are the building blocks of protein and RNA. And this is important. We know essential amino acids are the building blocks of protein and collagen. Having all the essential amino acids in the correct ratio is necessary for complete protein synthesis without the caloric impact. But if we want perfect protein synthesis, we need to look at the process of protein synthesis itself. Because if the process is faulty, we won't get the correctly made protein, collagen, fibrin, or the red blood cells in our bloodstream or our muscles. We can even stop

Starting point is 00:20:51 creation of specific proteins, which can affect us in so many different ways. Our DNA and our RNA are what direct protein synthesis, building new proteins. If our DNA or RNA get damaged from toxins, harmful bacteria, or just plain aging, we get faulty protein synthesis. So cells, enzymes, and hormones are less functional and we get premature aging. By adding nucleosides and nucleotides, the building blocks of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, our cells get exactly what they need to help repair faulty DNA and RNA and improve the process of protein synthesis itself. This is next level science, and you need to try these. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So the second part is, well, okay, is it true

Starting point is 00:21:39 that lowering LDL by diet or drugs will reduce the risk of a heart attack, stroke, or death. But let's just focus specifically on heart attacks. So myself and two other cardiologists in 2020 published a paper, a systematic review, in BMJ evidence-based medicine to actually look to see whether this was true based upon the totality of evidence from drug trials, okay? Drug trials and some diet trials,

Starting point is 00:22:03 and put it all together because the mantra was, the lower the better. We found no clear correlation. It's complete nonsense, Gary. And this is in the published data, which means that this is not even the data you don't have access to. Absolutely. This is in the data made available, which is the shiniest, you know, brightest form of the data that's being put forward to the market. 100%. So then if that's true, right, if LDL lowering doesn't prevent heart attacks and strokes, how does statins work even for that small benefit? And I had figured out partly because in cardiology, it's well known when patients come in with heart attacks, we don't

Starting point is 00:22:41 even measure their cholesterol. We just put them on high-dose statins. And this was going on for years. And the word amongst cardiologists was, well, actually they have anti-inflammatory properties. They have plaque stabilizing properties. So I knew that already. And in fact, there is mechanistic data showing that they have slightly anti-clotting and anti-inflammatory effects, right? Before we get into side effect tissue. So the likely benefit of statins is nothing to do with LDL lowering, it's to do with that mechanism. But the fear of cholesterol

Starting point is 00:23:10 and the business of lowering cholesterol with all these other drugs and the new ones coming on the market is based upon, it's a trillion dollar industry, right? So you can understand from a financial perspective, the drug companies don't want this information to get out. Right. They would destroy the cholesterol lowering business. Right. Now, if we were to argue that, okay, let's lower cholesterol, it may benefit you and it's not

Starting point is 00:23:35 going to do any harm. Okay. You can make an argument for, for that. Right. Um, but as you know, Gary, actually the opposite seems to be true. I published a systematic review in 2016 in the BMJ. I was one of a co-author of many scientists around the world. To look at in older people over 60, was there first of all any correlation with LDL cholesterol and heart disease? We found none at all. We found an inverse association with LDL cholesterol and all-cause mortality. In other words, the higher LDL statistically, the less likely you were to die,

Starting point is 00:24:08 something that you obviously knew for many, many years. We did. And the reason for that, and people say, well, how is that possible? Cholesterol has a very important role in the immune system, and LDL specifically. And older people are more vulnerable to dying from infections. And even we know there is an association with low cholesterol and cancer, partly through an immune mechanism. So that's probably where the benefit is. Wow. So I honestly tell patients that when they come to see me in cardiology

Starting point is 00:24:34 with their cholesterol, I said, my purpose is to lower your risk. I have no interest in lowering cholesterol for the sake of lowering cholesterol. Right. And, and, and interestingly now they're tying these, um, you know, this hyper deficiency or hypo deficiency in, in cholesterol driven, driven by statins as, as there are links now being drawn to, um, early onset of all kinds of, um, mental conditions, you know, dementia, Alzheimer's, you know, hormone disruption. And we knew in the mortality space that if you actually had slightly elevated levels of LDL cholesterol and you went on a statin, we would reduce your life expectancy. And then, you know, a few years ago, I started reading the peer-reviewed studies where there was no reduction in all-cause mortality.

Starting point is 00:25:30 So they started saying, you know, taking out the reduction of all-cause mortality as a benefit and just really myopically looking at that one chemical, you know, and its capacity to reduce one compound in the body and saying that's the panacea of saving us from cardiovascular risk. But again, as we go back to big data, you can chart the trajectory and the incidence of use of statins in modern medicine. And you can look at all-cause mortality or you can look at the rates of cardiovascular disease.

Starting point is 00:26:04 You can look at the rates of cardiovascular disease. You can look at the rates of heart attack. Cardiovascular disease is still the number one killer of human beings, I think globally, certainly in the United States and Europe. So the biggest killer in the world has been confronted with one of the biggest medications in the world, and it hasn't slowed down. In fact, it's gotten worse. It hasn't. You're absolutely right. In fact in fact actually again the bmj published a paper to look in europe had increase in statins over a decade for example given to millions more people had any effect on reducing cardiovascular mortality and there was no effect right so another way of looking at the statistics as well gary is um if you take an average or a median increase in life expectancy i remember you know when i give

Starting point is 00:26:44 lectures to doctors and general practitioners, there are literally gaps in the audience. When I say, if you've had a heart attack, let's say the benefit is better. If you had a heart attack for an individual, you're, um, you're prevention, preventing a non-fatal heart attack in the next five years is one in 39 and mortality is about one in 83. Okay. The numbers need to treat.

Starting point is 00:27:02 Okay. Still doesn't sound that great, but it's still much better than people, you know, one in a hundred. But if you look at the statistics differently, how much longer would you expect to live? Once you've had a heart attack,

Starting point is 00:27:13 say you're in your mid fifties, um, taking a stat in over a five year period. And the BMJ did this analysis again, looking at drug industry sponsored research. Okay. And they found that the increase in life expectancy over a five-year period was an additional 4.2 days. I heard that. Wow. Right.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Now, how do we explain no reduction in cardiovascular mortality, even in high-risk people in these population studies from taking statins, increasing statins, is actually, Gary, when you look at the data, real world data, 20 to 50% of patients prescribed statins, even people at high risk, will stop taking them within two to three years. And when you ask them why, it's because they felt worse. They think they had side effects, particularly brain fog, fatigue, muscle aches. You mentioned this link. It's very interesting with Alzheimer's and dementia. I haven't seen that data. However, there is a plausible reason for that.

Starting point is 00:28:10 Statins also increase insulin resistance. One in a hundred people taking statins will get type two diabetes. Wow. For years, people have been saying that- That's almost the same number as will benefit from statins. Well, exactly. So for years, people have been saying

Starting point is 00:28:23 that Alzheimer's is type three diabetes, right? So the underlying root cause that is definitely plays a role in the development of dementia and Alzheimer's cancer. And of course is the main pathophysiological process, if you like, behind heart disease is insulin resistance. Yes. Right. And there's no pill that's effectively targeting insulin resistance. It all comes down to simple lifestyle changes. Yeah. I love where you're going with this. Before we move on to the lifestyle changes, because I do want to give people tips and tricks for, you know, lifestyle changes. I want to go back to the data because when you talked about published trials from pharmaceutical industries and actually going into those trials and using their own data to say this is what the data says, that's the data that's known, that's seen.

Starting point is 00:29:13 Talk a little bit about what happens when a pharmaceutical company actually goes to have their research published or submits it to the Food and Drug Administration for drug trial approval, there's an assumption that the data that they're giving is truthful and accurate. And I know from statistics, I'm not a mathematician, but I spend plenty of time building probabilistic models. You know, we almost had a saying that you tell me what you want the data to say and I'll have the data say that. And you could take the same data set. And I think that, you know, causal and efficacy and there's all of these terms in the literature that even some physicians and certainly the general public don't understand. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:00 And, you know, relative risk. You know, what is the relative risk ratio? I mean, unless you've specifically been trained to read medical literature, it's hard to actually understand what they mean. We think of it in some simple terms that if something increases or decreases my relative risk, it's increasing or decreasing the direct risk of that event, which is actually not true. Um, so without, again, getting too complicated, complicated, what I was fascinated by was what you uncovered very often in some of these published peer-reviewed

Starting point is 00:30:32 randomized clinical trials that are now making it into major medical journals and that the information has never actually been independently reviewed. Yeah. So I think the top line to put that all together, Gary, and elaborate on it is that medical knowledge is under commercial control, but most doctors don't know that. So the drug companies, that's just their primary motive and their legal obligation

Starting point is 00:30:58 is to make profit for their shareholders, not to give you the best treatment. When they design their trials, their clinical trials, often they design the trial to try and give them the best treatment. When they design their trials, their clinical trials, often they design the trial to try and give them the best results, even before the trial started, right? They're already thinking about that they've got their new product. They think it's going to be a great seller.

Starting point is 00:31:21 How can we design the trial to get the right people in the trial who are less likely to get side effects and more likely to benefit, right? It's not a true hypothesis. No, no, no. Oh, it's bad science. It's really bad science. And so that's how the trials are done. Often these trials, these randomized trials involving thousands of patients, the data that's collected is often tens of thousands of pages long.

Starting point is 00:31:47 So over a five-year trial, for example, on statins, they will collect lots of data. And then that raw data is then curated into a summary report, which goes to the regulator. So in this country, it's the FDA. In the UK, we have the MHRA. And they then approve the drug but there are problems because often they don't look at they just accept what they're told by the drug industry the summary reports right which means that they can hide data on harms and we with lots of examples of that and the other conflict the other problem gary we've got is that these regulators now take most of their money from industry so the fda gets% of its funding from industry. This is from a BMJ investigation in 2022.

Starting point is 00:32:30 Our FDA gets 65% of its funding. From Big Pharma. From Big Pharma, not from the federal government. No, 65%. Our regulator in the UK gets 86% of its funding from pharma. You're kidding me. And there's a massive conflict of interest because what happens, a lot of these people within these regulatory bodies, they want to please the drug industry because more often than not, when they leave their roles as regulators, they get offered very lucrative jobs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Starting point is 00:32:59 They don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Then what happens is the articles get published in medical journals and the medical journals themselves, and this is pointed out in the documentary by probably one of the giants of medical journal, you know, editorship is Dr. Fiona Godley,

Starting point is 00:33:16 former editor of the BMJ, is that medical journals are businesses and often take millions from big pharma, either in advertising, but more commonly for selling reprints

Starting point is 00:33:27 back to the drug industry, right? That can be used as marketing material. And a really good example of just how bad this can be, and this is one example that we know of, Gary, is the Vioxx scandal. Yeah, that was terrible. So this was a drug that was marketed in the late 90s as a blockbuster drug better than ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory drug company was merck and um it was published in new journal of medicine number one impact medical journal in the world and what happened later on is that the it became clear that merck had hidden data showing that it was going to double, at least double your risk of a heart attack or stroke or death and ultimately likely killed 60,000 Americans. Right. It was pulled from the market and think 2004, 2011 Merck were fined almost $1 billion for this. But what was most extraordinary is in the litigation process, which we explained in the documentary involving Dr. John Abramson, a lecturer at Harvard, that it revealed the chief scientist of Merck,

Starting point is 00:34:33 when the drug was being rolled out, an internal email said, it's a shame about the cardiovascular risk of this drug, but the drug will do well and we will do well. In other words, I know it's probably going to kill people, but we're going to make a lot of money out of this. Now this comes from the chief scientist of Merck at the time. Wow. Right. And this was just,

Starting point is 00:34:53 we, we, we, as human beings, you know, we become acceptable collateral damage. You know, this is not,

Starting point is 00:35:00 and nothing has changed in the system, Gary, to stop these sorts of events happening again. And just to get to the diagnosis as well of just how these big corporations operate as entities is that when the FDA became aware that there was a cardiovascular risk, they wrote to Merck and said, you need to put a black box warning on your packaging. Not only did Merck ignore that, they doubled down on their marketing. They purchased more reprints from the New Journal of Medicine, right? And their

Starting point is 00:35:31 aim was to make sure that every doctor in the United States had a copy of the original fraudulent paper in the New Journal of Medicine to say that this drug was the best drug for, you know, best painkiller, better than ibuprofen. And that's what they did. Hey guys, Gary Brekker here. And I want to talk to you about something I consider a true game changer in my health regimen. Kettle and fire bone broth. When it comes to bone broth, kettle and fire is simply the cleanest on the market. They use only grass fed and grass finished beef bones, ensuring you get 19 grams of high quality protein per serving. It's the ultimate fuel, especially for those of you diving into extended fasting protocols. In fact, this is the only bone

Starting point is 00:36:10 broth I trust and I use for all of my fasting challenges. And now you can experience it for yourself. Just head over to KettleAndFire.com and use the code ULTIMATEHUMAN to save 20% off your entire order. Trust me, you don't want to miss this. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Right. So what do you call that behavior? When I ask audiences, people say evil, crazy. There's actually a very precise diagnosis, which isn't my diagnosis, but I agree with it. Robert Hare is a forensic psychologist who was behind the original definition of psychopathy in the international DSM criteria. In the book and the documentary, The Corporation, which was written by Joel Bacan, law professor

Starting point is 00:36:51 in 2000, he actually says, as entities, big corporations, especially big pharma, actually feel for the diagnosis for psychopath. Wow. So what does that mean? Callous and concerned for the safety of others, incapacity to experience guilt, repeated lying, conning others for profit. So what we are dealing with, Gary, really at the root of the problem in my view, and I don't want to make this over inflammatory, but I just wanted people to understand what we're dealing with is that the root, we have this machine that is pathologically self-interested when it comes to making money. And we are now suffering the consequences of that in healthcare. And, you know, as a consequence of VIAX, nobody was held responsible.

Starting point is 00:37:31 There were some big fines paid, multi-billion dollar fines. I think there was a billion dollar fine initially. And then several months or years later, after class action litigation that had more than 20,000 patients, they paid another four or $5 billion fine. But you know, if you, if you have a drug that makes 25, $30 billion and you pay a $5 billion fine, I mean, that's, that's cost of business. Yeah. That's the cost of business. You know, I've talked about this before too. Again, I hate to get on here and sound like the conspiracy theorists. They're all out to get us. I don't think that there's one person at the top who's myopically sinister and goes, okay,

Starting point is 00:38:05 here's a plan to kill a bunch of people. I think that the way that the system has developed, right? We, we've taken these baby steps. You know, my father used to talk about this. He was a disciplinary and a Navy captain and like, he was very, very, very regimented and, you know, and he, he, he was very scheduled and very regimented. And one of the things he used to tell me about, you know, being a captain in the Navy was you have to have these rigid parameters because little tiny mistakes made over and over, over time cost lives, you know, out at sea. And I think that what's happened is the industry has slowly crept into this position. You know, we have a legal system that has pharmaceutical companies responsible to shareholders to make a profit. Yeah. So they actually have a legal and criminal liability for not doing so, responsibility to turn a profit for their shareholder to do what's in the best interest of

Starting point is 00:39:05 the shareholder it just so happens that they're also in the business of making the chemicals and the synthetics and the pharmaceuticals that are going into human beings but they have no obligation to that human being right they don't they don't have absolutely outcome of that patient and this has been an increment you're absolutely right gary this has been an increment incremental problem that's developed over years even centuries when you look at the founding of America, it's very interesting. You could only form a business, governments only allowed businesses to form if you produced a product that was beneficial for society. That was the primary motive. We've gone from that to profit making at any cost. You know, and very often guys like yourself, myself, we get accused of fear mongering. And I actually don't think it's fear mongering. I think it's hope monitoring, mongering, because the fear should be that I need to rely on a chemical or a synthetic or a pharmaceutical so that I don't die.

Starting point is 00:39:59 But the truth is you can rely on lifestyle modifications and there is hope for putting nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids back into your body, living a healthy lifestyle, exercise. I mean, exercise across nearly every spectrum outperformed pharmaceutical intervention. Absolutely. SSRIs, which by the way was talked about in your documentary. I mean, I forget the woman's name who... Kim W sack yeah and she lost her husband uh to suicide and he was he was a young entrepreneur happy healthy wasn't even taking antidepressants for um depression he was taking them for to help him sleep yeah and prescribed off label and again it was pfizer hidden data that one of the side effects could be increasing the risk of suicide.

Starting point is 00:40:45 Yeah, suicidal ideation. I mean, we've had horrible strings of school shootings here in the United States. And very often you find that those perpetrators were on high doses of SSRIs, right? Because it removed their ability to feel empathy. And for a young entrepreneur that's just having sleep trouble to suddenly, you know, take his own life by hanging himself, to me is a real travesty. And, you know, she talked about, that's what turned her into a medical advocate. In any case, getting back to the point, I think that what's happened is, you know, we have, we have an industry built on disease. We have an industry built on managing disease.

Starting point is 00:41:31 We've done nothing to change toxic soup, as Casey Means calls it, that we're bathing our cellular biology in. We've, and there's, there's no way to slow this system down, right? Other than to provide an alternative. And that's one of the things I want to talk to you about is, you know, as a cardiologist and someone who's probably operated on hundreds, if not thousands of hearts, seen hundreds, if not thousands of patients, what are the lifestyle modifications? What are some of the big myths out there? Yeah. So I think when I started looking into this and tried to understand what is the best evidence on lifestyle looking at the different components that play into that i think the low-hanging fruit and one of the biggest ones of course is diet right so

Starting point is 00:42:16 you know according to the lancet global burden of disease reports poor diets is responsible for more disease and death globally now than physical inactivity, smoking and alcohol combined. Really? So yeah, it's a huge one. It's also interestingly, Gary, the only intervention that on its own can actually send type two diabetes into remission, get people off their blood pressure pills, et cetera. So if we come back to the root cause of the issue is abnormal metabolic health rooted in insulin resistance. And for the, for the lay person, um, only 12% of adult Americans now have optimal metabolic health. So what does that mean? It means your triglycerides and your HDL

Starting point is 00:42:55 part of your cholesterol profile are in the normal range. Okay. Nothing to do with LDL cholesterol, right? Uh, it means that you have a normal waist circumference. It means that you do not have pre-hypertension or high blood pressure, and you're not pre-diabetic or you don't have type 2 diabetes. Only one in eight Americans, and only one in four age between 20 and 40 are in that situation.

Starting point is 00:43:15 That's how bad, right? So the root of that is insulin resistance. How does one combat insulin resistance when it comes to diet? And the most obvious way, the clear way is to reduce the foods in your diet that are going to have the biggest impact on raising glucose and therefore insulin. So that means ultimately minimizing starch and sugar. And then I looked at the twin of heart disease and this paper I published was you've got interresistance,

Starting point is 00:43:45 but heart disease is a chronic inflammatory process. So what is the best data that we have on anti-inflammatory foods with some outcomes? There's only a couple of randomized trials. One was the PREDIMED study in Spain that followed up people at high risk with extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds and a Mediterranean style diet. And another one was a Mediterranean diet with people with heart disease. But really to answer that is from a diet perspective, I tend to tell my patients good quality extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds daily, oily fish at least twice a week, and a mixture of whole fruit

Starting point is 00:44:20 and vegetables. Wow. That's just how we ate out there before. Yeah, no, it was amazing. Healthiest meal I've had in the United States and I've been here two weeks, you know. There you go. Yeah. And sadly it has to come from an Amish farm, you know, or from my Parker Pastures, you know, folks out in Colorado. You know, I often say that it's not really the food. Sometimes it's the distance from the food to the table. Yeah. There was a really interesting discussion. I'm giving your documentary a lot of love because you guys got to watch the documentary. But, you know, they talk about putting together a processed food system, like a ranking system, one, two, three.

Starting point is 00:44:59 Yes. Which I consider myself pretty in the know, and I was even unaware of that. And, you know, they talked about, you know, what is a whole food? What is a processed food? Yeah. Because I think when we say, stop eating highly processed foods, people are like, well, what is a highly processed food? Or what is a minimally processed food? What is a whole food?

Starting point is 00:45:20 And he used the example of an apple. Yeah. And he said, you know, that's a whole food. You pick an apple off the tree and you eat it, you're eating a whole food. But then if you take an apple and you treat it, you put a preservative on it or something, now you're in like a class two. And then if you put a, now if you have insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, you package it, you slice it, you've altered it, and you put it

Starting point is 00:45:47 on the shelf, and now you're at a stage three. It's minimally processed. And then you get to the highly processed, and you use the example of a McDonald's apple pie where you can't find the apple. Because then you take the apple and you add sugar and high fructose corn syrup and, you know, preservatives to keep it from looking brown. And you, and you add flour and all of these ingredients to it. But there's still a, a hint of an apple in there. Yeah. Now you have a highly processed food. Absolutely. And, and I think, we have been so inundated with highly processed foods. I mean, 65%, 67% roughly of our diet is highly processed. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:46:34 So the term that's used from this NOVA classification is they call it ultra processed, which is the most processed. Ultra processed, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And a very simple way, which I explain to patients is, which is from that classification, if it has five or more ingredients on the packaging if you can count five or more ingredients usually with additives and preservatives it's ultra processed and best avoided and all the data and the studies are pointing in one direction when when you look at observational studies or population studies of

Starting point is 00:46:59 the higher the consumption of this food every single disease pretty much from heart disease or cause of mortality, depression, you know, cancer, all of it goes in one direction correlated with the consumption of these foods. What's interesting is there's also some data refuting that, but it's coming from- Big food. Yeah, big food in the industry. And they show, because I have peers,

Starting point is 00:47:23 folks that I, you know know have some respect for in in this industry that will you know that will say well there was a you know study published in xyz that says that you know artificial uh you know sweeteners are not bad for you they don't destroy your gut microbiome the seed oils um are non-inflammatory that um and this harkens back to the same issues that we have in pharmaceutical research where you have to ask the question are we seeing all the data yeah um and you have to look at the whole scope of the trial i mean you could get a phd and analyze analyzing these these trials and then you take one little sliver of data and you end up with a food pyramid that says the Lucky Charms are more nutritious than grass-fed steak, sponsored by

Starting point is 00:48:12 Nabisco or Kraft or Nestle. And then you even take a further step back and you look at the consolidation of tobacco companies into food companies and the relatively few number of food companies that own nearly all of the processed food industry. And you see this concentration of power, trillions of dollars concentrated in a war chest that has the ability to affect scientific research, that has the ability to impact public policy, that has the capacity to affect the nutritional narrative, and even publish nutritional research that is widely in their favor. And to go against it, like yourself, it's fear-mongering rather than hope-mongering because we're teaching people to get back to the basics. So somebody's listening to this and they've recently had, you know,

Starting point is 00:49:06 blood work done and their LDL cholesterol is, is elevated. Um, their insulin is elevated. They are, um, pre-diabetic, which is more than 50% of Americans right now. What would you should say are the suggestion steps that they, that they follow to get out of it? Yeah. I mean, what I do actually, because I think patients, they like to look at, to see that what they're doing is having an impact. And, you know, one of the things I discovered early on is that the data suggested that dietary changes rapidly can improve cardiovascular risk factors, even within 21 days. I've seen it. Gary, you know this. Yeah, we've seen it on thousands and thousands of patients. Yeah. So I usually go with these particular patients

Starting point is 00:49:46 who have these metabolic abnormalities. I go with primarily a low-carb Mediterranean-style diet. So I say go cold turkey, not forever, but go completely cold turkey on the starch and the sugar for the next six weeks. And usually they come back. White flour, white bread, pasta, potatoes. Absolutely, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Great. Too much fruit juice, for example example all these sorts of things and then um and that's really all they need to do but of course i do give other advice as well around uh you know the exercise i say keep it simple you know a lot of people who are very overweight and starting from a very sort of it's not necessarily good for them to go really hard in the gym at that stage right they want to just get into a better but keep it simple can you do a 30 minute brisk walk every day, for example, just get a little bit out of breath 30 minutes a day, you know, doesn't cost anything. Uh, and then the, one of the, I think one of the missing parts of this discussion,

Starting point is 00:50:39 which again, you know, as I think had a profound impact on my thinking in the last few years is the, uh, the impact of stress and the impact of stress reduction and what that can do for you. Yeah. This was fascinating. Even for me, we had this conversation. I'm glad you brought this up because that was one of the things I want to talk about. Um, you know, we talked about this at the, at, at the table. You, you said something and I, I was flabbergasted by it, that just the impact of stress, mental stress, emotional stress, is akin to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. Hey guys, I want to talk to you about something that could truly change your health, your gut. The gut is the foundation of your overall well-being, impacting your energy, mental clarity,

Starting point is 00:51:23 immune system, and even your mood. If you've been dealing with issues like gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, irritability, fatigue, brain fog, then there's chances that your gut is out of balance. That's why I created the Ultimate Gut Reset Challenge, a simple but powerful three-day live program designed to reset and rebuild your gut health. We start on October 28th, and over the three days, you'll experience a complete gut transformation. Each day focuses on a different aspect of gut health. You'll get daily meal plans, expert tips, and access to a private community where I'll guide you every single step of the way. Plus, we've partnered with top health brands like Body Health, Baja Gold Salt, and Echo

Starting point is 00:51:59 Hydrogen Water to provide the best tools for your gut journey. So if you're ready to take control of your gut health and feel your best, sign up today with the link below and don't miss this chance to reset, rebuild, and restore your gut. Join me in the Gut Reset Challenge and transform your health from the inside out. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You know, what's interesting is when you look at some of the mortality statistics, even blue zones, where people are exercising and have little stress and have a sense of purpose and are eating whole foods very often they have some of these bad habits you know they yeah mocha pipe or smoke a cigarette absolutely and they're 96 years

Starting point is 00:52:34 old and they're walking up a 37 degree incline to go to i don't suggest you start an exercise program and start having a pack of mobile lights but um, um, but I think that we are, because exercise is so readily available, it's a choice, it's a lifestyle choice. It's a modifiable risk factor. We simply don't give it the value in our life that it deserves. And, you know, and I argue that it should be a non-negotiable meetings and travels should be scheduled around sleep and exercise, not sleep and exercise scheduled around meetings and travel yes but i want you to expand upon what you were going to say because i was even fascinated yeah so chronic stress you know again for when it comes to heart disease you're absolutely right it's a similar risk to being a smoker having type 2

Starting point is 00:53:19 diabetes or having high blood pressure but most of us are not dealing with or not we don't know how to deal with it and the mechanism behind it there's a really interesting paper published in the lancet i think it was 2020 where they took hundreds of people in middle age and they used a um high-tech mri of the brain called fmri to look at the amygdala in the brain which is the emotional center and what they correlated was the subjective levels of stress there was more activity in the amygdala with people who were higher stressed so they reported i am stressed out absolutely and that also correlated perfectly with inflammatory markers in the blood and clotting factors when we know heart disease inflammatory

Starting point is 00:54:03 yeah so the evolution of the understanding of heart disease is, we know it's got very little to do with LDL cholesterol. I mean, this is, but you need to keep calling this out. It's nonsense. Yeah. It's a chronic inflammatory process, which is related to clotting and insulin resistance. So that's probably the likely mechanism of how chronic stress causes heart disease. Why would that be? What's interesting from an evolutionary perspective, the explanation for this is that acute stress is not necessarily a bad thing and can be life-saving. So if you think back to whatever thousands of years ago,

Starting point is 00:54:37 we might be in the jungle, you know, running away from a tiger. In that situation, it is beneficial for our body to produce inflammatory markers and clotting factors to reduce our risk for bleeding to death and healing more quickly. But if this is constantly turned on at a low grade level, you can see how that can cause a damage to the body and especially to the heart. The good news is we do have some data and it makes sense that if you engage in activities to reduce your stress, and that's what I always tell my patients to do. Right. And actually, you know, I send them to a, there's a brilliant nurse I work with who

Starting point is 00:55:14 is a stress reduction expert, but an expert is particularly in breath work that that is likely going to have an effect on, on the heart, but also improve quality of life, mental health. And when they are going through dietary changes, you know, as well as I do, Gary, that often people stress eat, right? So actually if they get on top of their mind as well, simultaneously, it's going to be easier for them to adopt healthy lifestyle changes, which then become a habit and their quality of life improves and they don't look back. Of course, the challenge we have, and I think it's really important we mention this, we're not going to sort out the chronic disease pandemic

Starting point is 00:55:50 because of individual responsibility. We all have a role to play. Most of what drives people's eating habits is rooted in the food environment, an oversupply of ultra-processed food. We need to make healthy food more affordable. Some people don't even have the agency to be able to even buy, you know, we need to make healthy food more affordable. Some people don't even have the agency to be able to even buy, you know, to eat the kind of foods that we have the luxury of eating.

Starting point is 00:56:09 So that's where you need a third party, ideally a, you know, an effective, honest government that actually puts the interest of the people first, not big corporations to come in and say, listen, we are going to help improve the food environment. We're not saying ban junk foods completely. People are always going to enjoy the occasional meal. That's fine. But we should make the healthy choice the easy choice. At the moment, the unhealthy choice

Starting point is 00:56:36 has become the easy choice. And that's where we are, where we are. Interestingly, we sit here today, you and I are actually supposed to be at a meeting for Make America Healthy Again, which is not a political agenda. It's a humanitarian agenda to get the corruption out of our food supply and to really target the pandemic of chronic disease in young children, the highest rates of adolescent cancer that we've had in recorded history, life expectancy beginning to go backwards, the highest rates of

Starting point is 00:57:11 chronic disease, multiple chronic diseases in a single biome, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and morbid obesity, and also just pre-diabetes. and yourself and myself and several prominent thought leaders, um, in the longevity and biohacking space where we're in Miami right now. And we're supposed to get hit by a hurricane in 24 hours. So Dr. Seen was kind enough to actually not cancel his flight and come in and, um, to deliver his podcast to you guys. But, um But I think there's so much that we can do as a society, as an industry to put pressure on our politicians and our public policy advocates to create public policy that really serves the best interests of the people, because we are clearly going the wrong direction in the United States. And people that are against the grain, you know, as I've spoken out, again, I am not

Starting point is 00:58:09 a physician. And so I never tell people, get off your medications, you know, stop taking blood pressure medication, stop taking cholesterol medication. But what I do say is there are alternative lifestyle changes that could put you in a position where your physician will take you off of those. And I think there's a real opportunity. We've gotten to such a place now where we're almost at a tipping point. You know, we spent $4.5 trillion a year on healthcare,

Starting point is 00:58:35 and at some point it's going to become too expensive to maintain the status quo. We either go blindly bankrupt or we have to take a clear-eyed look at causality. And a very sensitive subject, which you and I spoke a little bit about before coming on the podcast was, you know, the vaccinations and isolating some of these vaccines especially the new evolution of mrna messenger rna vaccines and for the layperson you know mrna is a you know the dna inside the nucleus of the cell is is is running the show dna is the ceo right he's he's given commands to the cell he's he's replicating, making an exact copy of himself or herself. But these messages called messenger RNA, messenger ribonucleic acid, this transcription process

Starting point is 00:59:35 of sending a message from the DNA in the nucleus of the cell into the cell is a very new way, mimicking that message is a very new way of creating vaccines. You know, when I was growing up, most vaccines were attenuated viruses, right? We would take the nucleocapsid protein of the virus or the, you know, the envelope of the virus, pluck the DNA out, and then you would put that viral envelope into the body and the immune system sees it, manufactures an antibody to it, but it has no capacity to infect you, right? Because it doesn't have the DNA to inject. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:00:11 That to me seems like a safer way of creating an immune response. I think what happened in the last pandemic, I don't know if it was for scale or volume or for expense, but we decided to do what I believe to be a gene experiment and take a synthetic copy of a messenger RNA and use that as a way to solicit an immune response. And what have you found to be some of the errors in that as a cardiologist? Yeah. So, you know, first of all, Gary, I think it's important, as you've said already, this, you're right. It's, let's start from square one. This isn't a vaccine, this COVID, it was not nothing like traditional vaccines. It's a gene therapy, right? But because people associate the word vaccine with safe and effective, and there's good reason for that. I mean,

Starting point is 01:01:02 if you look at all of the interventions we do in medicine with all the side effects of drugs, et cetera, and I'm not saying no drug and no vaccine is completely safe, right? But when you look at and compare them to traditional vaccines that have gone through five to 10 years of testing, they are definitely one of the safest things we do. And just to give some perspective here, I know we're talking about published research findings being false, etc. But you can still make a comparison according to published data, serious know now, um, it's probably one of the biggest medical mistakes, um, potential frauds and horrific, um, fair to say experiments that have been, uh, you know, uh, impacted upon the world population that I think we will see in our lifetime.

Starting point is 01:02:10 And in very simple terms, the best quality level of evidence, of course, is a randomized control trial. But there was a reanalysis done of those original trials done by Pfizer and Moderna by very eminent scientists and published in the journal Vaccine. People can look this up, still stands up to scrutiny. Maybe I'll dig it up and I'll put it in the show notes. And they found in the reanalysis of the data that led to the approval, by the way, so this is the source data that led to approval of the vaccines, genetic therapies, coercion and mandates, you were more likely to suffer serious harm from these vaccines, COVID vaccines, than you were to be hospitalized with COVID. And that serious harm rate was about one in 800 at two months in the short term. And remember, this is a population of people that was designed, who were put into the trials that are less likely to get side effects.

Starting point is 01:02:55 So we're talking about in the short term of a serious adverse event, or at least one in 800. And what does that mean? It means life changing event. It means hospitalization or disability. And of course, the most common of those serious adverse events were issues related to clotting, pulmonary emboli, heart attacks, for example. Now, that is unprecedented. If we knew that from the beginning, they never would have been approved for use in a single human being. And I genuinely believe what we're seeing now, we're seeing obviously excess death rates in highly vaccinated countries. We have plausible mechanism. We're seeing mortality statistics.

Starting point is 01:03:30 Yeah. We have all the different levels of different types of data and different levels of data, all pointing in the same direction that this was a very, very, very bad idea. So now that we're there, what do we do to get rid of it? I mean, because how does somebody guard against the thrombolytic thrombocytopenia? Yeah, I mean, it's going to vary from person to person, Gary, I think. I think in general, though, my overall antidote, if you like, is, again, this is our opportunity to maximize our lifestyle changes that we can to reduce any inflammatory process in the body. But the truth is this until it's fully accepted and acknowledged by the medical establishment and the mainstream politicians, we're not going to get all of the best minds within medical science looking at who is really at risk of long-term problems and what can we do about it? And that's obviously my greatest concern.

Starting point is 01:04:22 You know, I think one of the things that, you know, my expertise is cardiology. I'm not a vaccine expert, but what I can tell you, one of the things I discovered and I published on this, and I think I do have expertise who didn't have any age, any, no family history of heart disease, you know, had some heart scans done in a few years early. Everything was pretty okay. Mild, if you like, uh, very active person. I was pretty shocked, you know, to understand why this happened. And when the post-mortem findings came back, didn't make sense to me. I had two of his three arteries had severe blockages. So in my head, I was like, something has happened in the last few years in a short space of time that has suddenly accelerated, you know, his coronary artery disease. And Stephen Gundry, a cardiologist here in the US,

Starting point is 01:05:12 published a paper. I just did a podcast with him. Yeah, Stephen's great. I met him recently. And what he told me was quite interesting because I haven't published. It's funny, I did a podcast with you in the US and I did a podcast with him in London.

Starting point is 01:05:21 Oh, right. I just thought that was kind of funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have swapped. But what he told me was really interesting. Oh, right. I just thought that was kind of funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have swapped. But what he told me was really interesting. So, you know, he published this paper, this abstract in circulation, and he basically found that in his patients

Starting point is 01:05:33 who were middle-aged, the baseline risk of a heart attack went from 11% risk in five years to 25% within eight weeks of having two doses of the mRNA vaccines, which is huge, right? When I saw that paper and it was linked to inflammation, I was like, the penny dropped for me. I was like, okay, this is likely what happened to my dad, even six months after having the vaccine. But I immediately thought if this is real or even partially true, we're going to

Starting point is 01:06:00 basically increase everybody's risk of heart disease in the population that's had the vaccine and accelerate it. And I was then seeing patients with those problems who had angiograms pre-vaccine and suddenly developing 90% blockages within a few months of having two doses. Few months. Yes. So it's causing rapid acceleration in many people. And that's probably one of the main drivers behind the excess death rates is the cardiovascular mortality and heart attacks happening because of these vaccines that should again, never have been I'm be very clear, Gary, I'm happy to stand in it. You know, I've given witness statements in courts in Finland. And I can back this up. I've got a period paper on this. Honestly speaking, this should never have been given in retrospect to any single human being.

Starting point is 01:06:45 And if we had had system changes in place, which is what the movie tries to highlight, where actual data that drug industry produces is independently verified from its source, we would never be in this situation to begin with. Meaning the actual source data, not the consolidated reports that are then fed. It's astounding to me that public policymakers approve life-altering medications, drugs, and synthetics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, based on somebody else's promise that this data is valid or the consolidation of this data has been properly put together. I just feel like we should be able to see the blueprint, not just the final construction. I think there's a huge blind spot. So people say, well, why would people deliberately do this?

Starting point is 01:07:39 And I don't think it's that simple. I don't think it's that simple either. Again, I want to say that I don't think it's that simple either like again i want to i want to say that i don't think that a pharmaceutical ceo or you know the boardroom is like how do we kill more people or let's figure out a way to hide this data i i just think the design of the system is such that the visibility is not is not there um certainly not the informed consent absolutely and it's ultimately self-defeating as well, because it's a kind of false economy. You know, one of the problems with the drug industry

Starting point is 01:08:10 as well, if you look at data where in the last 20 years, most new drugs are copies of old ones. They change a few molecules here and there, and they take an old generic drug, they patent it, give it a new name and make lots of money. Then move on to the next one. And only about, you know, less than 10% of drugs, maybe less than that, are actually clinically meaningful new drugs that come on the market of therapeutic value over other drugs. And there was one... GLP-1s. Well, and one study, you know, that was done in, looked at data from Canada and France, showed that double the amount of drugs that were beneficial, about 15% of them,

Starting point is 01:08:50 were more harmful. So the overall net effect of, it's very clear, the overall net effect at the moment of the drug industry on society is a negative one. If we get better transparent evaluation of data, then it will, and it air into level playing field. It would actually encourage real innovation within the drug industry where we could produce actual drugs that are going to be beneficial for specific groups of people.

Starting point is 01:09:13 Because there are some drugs that are beneficial. There are, there are absolutely. But the system at the moment is not, it's not, it's a, it's in my view, it's a, it's a very brittle false economy and it's causing huge damage to the population. And if we have the opportunity, Gary, which I'm sure hopefully we will, I know, you know, coming here was, we were going to meet a very prominent politician, you know, and, and again, as a doctor, for me, this is, I know that things are very polarized in this country. They will ask me that, you know, why are you speaking to that guy? Who's a Republican Senator or blah, blah, blah. And so listen, you know, first of all,

Starting point is 01:09:43 I, you know, I quote Malcolm X who said I'm for the truth, no matter who tells it. Right. And I even got criticized from, you know, friends of mine saying that, why did he get interviewed by Tucker Carlson, for example. Right. And that's why I replied to them. But the other side of it is, is doctors, our duty and responsibility is not to discriminate people according to their race, their political affiliation agenda. If you needed to know a patient's political affiliation before you actually operated on them. So I'm very happy to speak to any politician that has the means ultimately to change the laws, Gary,

Starting point is 01:10:14 that got us into this problem in the first place. These are unjust, unscientific, and unethical laws that allowed big pharma to have so much power. And we need to then change those laws back to something that's democratic and fair and just. Great. So what is the future for Dr. Malhotra? I mean, where do you,

Starting point is 01:10:32 where is your passion, your vision, you know, in a perfect world, what have you accomplished in the next five years? I mean, I, you know, my good friend, Robert Kennedy Jr. says, when you speak the truth you got let go of the outcome so i don't think of five years i think i think day by day doing your best being the best version of yourself my primary goal and my purpose as a doctor is to improve patient outcomes you know in in very simple terms manage risks treat illness and relieve suffering and to have conversations and be involved in

Starting point is 01:11:06 creating environments where everybody can be, everyone can flourish. Everyone could be the best version of themselves through conversation, you know, through structural changes to address the biopsychosocial determinants of health, you know? So that's really where my focus is. You know, first of all, this has been an amazing podcast. I definitely want to have you back again. You know, I wind down every podcast by asking all my guests the same question. So if you see my podcast, you know this question's coming.

Starting point is 01:11:41 And there's no right or wrong answer to this, but what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I think first and foremost, in the last few years, Gary, I think I've become a much more spiritual. Partly, partly, you know, through our own challenges in life. Everyone has unique challenges and we all suffer that's part of life in different ways you know i've lost both my parents in a very short space of time um i've also had a lot of medical persecution when you put your head above the parapet you know you're going to get attacked uh and and i found a lot of comfort in spirituality and what i've

Starting point is 01:12:22 learned from that is the most important thing that going back to square one is that you can't be a healthy person and you can't have a healthy society unless you have healthy values so how can i be the best possible human i can be and what does that mean it means um personal growth it means lifelong learning it means giving back to the community. And it means making sure I enhance the quality of my relationships with my friends, my family, my so-called partner, whenever that happens. So that for me is my main focus. And then to disseminate that to as many people as possible. That's a good one.

Starting point is 01:12:58 That is a good one. Well, Dr. Mahal, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast. This has been amazing. Thank you, Gary. I actually enjoyed the pre- can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast. This has been amazing. Thank you, Gary. I actually enjoyed the pre-podcast in my kitchen as much as the podcast. So promise me that you'll come back again and you'll stay in the fight for our Make America Healthy Great movement. I look forward to that. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:13:19 And as always, guys, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 105. Dr. Aseem Malhotra: The REAL Reason for the Chronic Disease Pandemic

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.